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A beautiful garden tipi wedding to end the year with, complete with a bride who rode in on her horse. It was my childhood wedding dream, to ride to my wedding on a grey horse, so it seems fitting to finish the year like this.

This year has been a bit all over the place, mainly due to the arrival of my second daughter in the summer. Any mums running their own business will know the challenges a new baby brings. Next year our family has exciting, possibly life changing, plans, which I will share when the time is right. I am looking forward to what the new year will bring, both personally and for The Natural Wedding Company.

I hope you have had a wonderful Christmas and all our best wishes for next year. Snuggle up with a festive drink and some chocolate and enjoy this beautiful garden tipi wedding. Over to Katie to tell us all about their wedding…

A garden tipi wedding

What a lovely treat we have for you today – the elegant eco garden wedding of our colleague Joanna. She’s been busy writing up the beautiful real weddings we get sent to be featured, but today we are taking a look at her own stunning wedding.

Think bouquets of coral peonies and blue delphiniums, a riverside marquee, and a steel pan band for this elegant eco garden wedding. Lots of thought went into taking care of their guests, from an ice cream van to wood-fired pizzas in the evening. Together with their family and friends, Joanna and Dan put lots of love into their wedding, keeping it eco-friendly in the most elegant way.

Over to Joanna to tell us more about their beautiful and elegant eco garden wedding…

An elegant eco garden wedding

When it’s so cold out and the days are short, it’s difficult to remember what the heat of summer feels like. But today we are transporting you back to a long hot day in July for this week’s real wedding. Kim and John got married at Fernhill Meadow on the Isle of Wight on a beautifully warm day in a fun garden party wedding.

On 23rd July the lovely couple, who got together on the island, held a relaxed, informal wedding. The ceremony was written by them and conducted by a friend under a rustic wooden arch, there were games of rounders and beer pong to entertain their guests, and a pretty preloved wedding dress.

We chatted to bride Kim to find out more about their fun garden party wedding, which was captured by TNWC recommended photographer Betti Confetti Photography…

Today’s wedding is just making me long for those lush spring days when the English countryside is covered in cow parsley and buttercups. Hanna and Guy were inspired by childhood storybook’s and fairytales, with fun details dotted throughout their wedding, which took place in a beautiful family garden.

We adore this kind of wedding, with its down-to-earth feel, involvement by family and friends, and those magical moments – in this case a marching band leading the bride and groom through a field of cow parsley (see below). This wedding was beautifully captured by our friend Joanna Ornowska of Images for Life, one of our TNWC Recommended Suppliers. Over to Hanna to tell you more about her whimsical storybook garden wedding…

A back garden wedding inspired by childhood stories

I liked the idea of having a wedding that was as tailored to our personalities and values as possible, and so the idea of using a venue that was licensed for civil ceremonies and had already hosted countless big days was immediately dismissed. Instead, we decided to have a humanist blessing in Guy’s mum’s glorious two-acre back garden, which is somewhat incongruously hidden away behind a suburban bungalow in rural Cambridgeshire.

We’re both passionate about traditional children’s stories and so we chose to follow a loose ‘storybook’ theme, transforming the garden into a magical fairytale land that we jokingly called ‘Ermine Island’.

Introducing our third lovely TNWC Real Bride of 2015 – the lovely Em, who is also getting married in a location very special to her and Mr-to-be Nick. I love that this year’s brides-to-be have all chosen really intimate spots for their wedding, not intimate in the sense of small, but places that they know really intimately.

Intimate homemade wedding in a beautiful walled garden

Hello, my name is Em, and Nick and I are getting married on 1st August 2015…which is perhaps a little ambitious as we got engaged just before Christmas and have a LOT to do. Add to this that we are also moving house in literally weeks and it has seemed like the perfect if chaotic storm. Although we made a few decisions relatively fast, we have a lot to work out before August and the months are beginning to glide by at an alarming rate.

Our ‘ideal wedding’

Describing the wedding we would like in 5 words, I would have to go for intimate, homemade, welcoming, warm and vintage. We will be getting married at Norton Priory Gardens, which is a beautiful walled garden in Runcorn where I grew up.

Nick and I have been there a few times with my son and Nick’s step son James (who is 2), and I have been going since I was a child, so it is somewhere which we hold very dear and if anything is our theme it is associating our wedding with memories and special people.

As we are booked in August, we are – fingers crossed! – going to have a lovely late summer afternoon (!) surrounded by the flowers and bees in a site which has been occupied since the middle ages. The reception venue will then be a local village hall in Manley, as we wanted to have a country family celebration air to the proceedings, with Amy Swann my amazingly creative friend making the cake (she initially recommended that I look on The Natural Wedding Company site!).

Colourful Cornish wedding

There are so many gorgeous details to love about today’s wedding I wouldn’tknow where to start, and a bride that says she wished to look like a woodland fairy queen on her big day is a bride after my own heart!

Ellie and Dean’s relaxed, Cornish wedding features an abundance of colourful accents including a vintage peacock print shawl, emerald shoes and swoon-worthy blooms. Then there’s a beautiful old, flower filled church and a garden party in a spectacular tent, with shared roast lamb platters to bring guests together.

To top it all off the portraits of the new Mr and Mrs look like they are straight out of a fairy tale! All captured exquisitely on film by fine art film photographers Taylor & Porter, who you can find listed in the directory as one of our recommended wedding suppliers, and in the words of bride Ellie “are absolutely fantastic.”

So on that note lets delve in, with bride Ellie providing more information about their big day …

TNWC Real Bride number three is Miriam, a lovely bride-to-be who I have ‘known’ for a while via my social media networks. I was pretty excited when she applied to be one of this year’s TNWC Real Brides and I love the sound of her wedding plans and am sure you will too.

Over to Miriam for all the details so far…

Hello! My name is Miriam and I am very excited to marry my wonderful fiance John on the 26th of July 2014. We first met two years ago in Edinburgh, when I was working as a vet in nearby Falkirk and he was teaching at a primary school in the city. Since then there have been several big life changes for both of us.

I now live in Bodmin in Cornwall, where we will eventually settle into married life together, and John is spending two years teaching overseas in Qatar. He returns for good just a month before the Big Day. To make things even more complicated we have settled on the gorgeous venue choice of Dryburgh Abbey near Melrose in the Scottish Borders, 350 miles from me and 3500 miles away from John.

It might not be easy organising a long-distance wedding, but we enjoy a challenge! With our families being an eclectic mix of Italian, Scottish and Irish we have lots of traditional family influences, and will certainly have a ceilidh and a piper (with a family connection as John’s dad runs a piping school in Edinburgh).

John proposed in the most modern way possible – via Skype! I was obviously over the moon, even more so when he returned at the Easter holidays with surprise Eurostar tickets to Paris as an (unnecessarily) compensatory big romantic gesture. We adore the sophisticated, romantic, carefree air of Paris and hope to have brought a piece of this back for our wedding, to fuse with our love of Scotland (especially Edinburgh) and the beautiful British countryside.